Chapter Eighty-Six. Melanie
CHAPTER EIGHTY-SIX
MELANIE
I break into a sprint, boots pounding the corridor, breath tearing in my throat. “Girls? Hannah!”
The exit sign glows ahead of me, stretching the shadows long. The dressing room door is open, a rectangle of light spilling out, swinging in a seasick tilt across the hall. A cluster of kids hovers there—Kayden, Billy, Teddy, and, oh thank God, Hannah.
I stop short, clutching my chest.
Sarah Lynn staggers from the doorway. Her face is like white clay, hollowed and stunned, like she’s seen something in that room that will forever change her.
I grab Hannah roughly by the arms and pull her to me. “You’re okay,” I say, more to reassure myself than her.
“Mom,” she sobs into my shoulder.
“Honey, what is it?”
But before she can answer, Sarah Lynn gasps. “Where were you?”
I turn to see Olivia walking toward us, still in her black leotard and ballet slippers.
“I wanted to watch y’all,” she says softly.
That’s when I notice the streaks of blood on the floor, tracking from Kayden’s sneakers to the open doorway.
I push Hannah back and step toward the light spilling from the room.
The smell of iron hits me, metallic and raw, and, at first, all I see is red.
The pool of it beneath the chair. The back wall and its racks of gowns, covered in blood.
Splatters on the ceiling, on the mirror. Bone and brain tissue scattered.
My hand flies to my mouth as I take it all in.
He shouldn’t be recognizable. The top half of his face is gone. I can see the top of his bottom molars, the tongue loose, the exposed shaft of a throat. But the camo jacket, the mud-caked boots give him away. Abel Sherman is dead.
I once had a patient, Mrs. Miller, a real sweet lady who passed away a few days after her ninety-second birthday.
She had wanted to donate her eyes to science.
The harvester came and I assisted, pulling the thin skin of her eyelid back, watching it fold over the small, polished retractor.
Watching as he severed the membrane and the optic nerve with clinical precision, then scooped the eye right out.
He filled the hollow pink socket with a prosthetic structure so that when we closed her eyes again, the look was natural.
So that, even though that piece of her body was missing, her family could still have an open casket, look at her to say their goodbyes.
It was more proof to me that the body didn’t matter.
I could look at Mrs. Miller and imagine her spirit unbound.
But this, all of this, is just too much. His head flipped back, open unnaturally, the jagged, blown-apart flesh. This isn’t an act of healing or preservation. It looks like a demon burst from the very core of him.
I turn away from him, just as Iggy enters the doorframe.
“Oh, God,” she says, spinning to shove Ben Sherman back, to stop him from seeing, but still, I see the image printed on his eyes like a scar.